The Great British Break-Up

To say that The Great British Bake Off is a cultural phenomenon understates how extraordinarily popular the BBC cooking contest has become. Last month, more than 10 million viewers in the U.K. watched the first episode of the seventh season—roughly half of all the television-owning households in the land. In 2015, seven of the top 10 most-watched television episodes of the year were episodes of GBBO. (While the British version of the show airs in the U.S. on PBS and Netflix, it’s referred to as The Great British Baking Show due to the fact that Pillsbury owns a trademark on the term “bake-off.”)